Sunday, November 28, 2010

The founder of whistle-blowing website 'Wikileaks.org', Julian Assange, has been dubbed the most dangerous man on earth.

Global truth machine or anarchy? We delve into the guarded world of Wiki in this exclusive report.

Julian Assange: "I have many other ideas, and as soon as WikiLeaks is strong enough to flourish without me I'll go on with these other ideas. It is strong enough to survive quite well without me now, but I don't know that it would flourish."

The controversial website WikiLeaks collects and posts highly classified documents and video. Founder Julian Assange, who's reportedly being sought for questioning by US authorities, talks about how the site operates, what it has accomplished -- and what drives him.

Friday, November 12, 2010

Do telepathy, clairvoyance and other "psi" abilities exist? The majority of the general population believes that they do, and yet fewer than one percent of mainstream academic institutions have any faculty known for their interest in these frequently reported experiences. Why is a topic of enduring and widespread interest met with such resounding silence in academia? The answer is not due to a lack of scientific evidence, or even to a lack of scientific interest, but rather involves a taboo. I will discuss the nature of this taboo, some of the empirical evidence and critical responses, and speculate on the implications.

Speaker: Dean Radin
Dean Radin is a researcher and author in the field of parapsychology. He is Senior Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and four-time former President of the Parapsychological Association. He holds an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a masters degree in electrical engineering and a doctorate in educational psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has worked at AT&T Bell Labs and GTE Labs, mainly on human factors of advanced telecommunications products and services, and held appointments at Princeton University, Edinburgh University, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, SRI International, Interval Research Corporation, and Boundary Institute. At these facilities he was engaged in basic research on exceptional human capacities, principally psi phenomena.

Any given line was down for about 1 day per month. It would take a call in the internet provider and telco, sometimes even sending technicians out to test the lines.

Even more frequently the CSU/DSU or Router would get in some weird states and would need to have the power cycled to get them back up.

It was painful. And nearly impossible to provide internet service over a T1.

After setting up T1's and T3's for many customers and having done 3 offices previously, in the next one I was determined to avoid all of the problems.

In my previous office a someone actually went in to the telco closet down in the underground parking garage in Beverly Hills and cut our T1 and phone lines! It didn't take me more then a few minutes to repair, but tought me a lesson.

So in the new office on La Cieniga Blvd & Pico in Los Angeles we found a cheap building that straddled the line between both phone companies GTE & Pac Bell.

I was able to set up 2 de-mark's (demarcation point) these are the big plywood board on the wall where all the phone connections come in from the street and get wired in to the building. One was in the back from GTE was locked behind a steel fence gate and then behind a discreet solid oak door and looked like a broom closet. The other in the corner of our servers room, with 2 more telco's coming in Pac Bell and MFS. It was very impressive intended for show and tell for visitors.

Not even the employees knew about the one in the back closet.

These had 3 T1 lines to 3 different ISP, Cerfnet, World Site and Softaware, all of which went in to different backbones.

John Sokol with 3 T1 Routers and CSU/DSU,
at Internet Broadcast System in 1996

These also had different IP blocks.

I had a pair of PC's below then that would connect to my Co-Located servers, and provide a non-encrypted VPN link in and out of the office to all of the remote servers out on the internet.

It worked very effectively.

The seed money from the company came from a brutal "Do or Die" contract with one customer. One in which we had bet everything in return for a million dollar advance on services. If we had any down time at all in a year we would loose our companies and the rights to all of our video source code for the "Livecam" product.

Well towards the end a year, we had proven we could indeed keep things running with 100% uptime, something unheard of in the industry. Two people who posing as telco employee's showed up to work on our lines, I was out of the office along with all of the engineers. So our receptionist ignoring strict orders was all to happy to be helpful after a little social engineering and unlock our server room and let them in. I don't even know how she had a key even.

The whole tech team and me were out meeting with this customer, I could sense something was wrong the whole time.

He had been stalling us.

When we returned from a meeting, the whole server room had been trashed.
Every wire cut, servers destroyed. The demark, torn to shreds.

The shock of it was gut wrenching.

Moments after I arrive, the customer who's office I had just left, called.

Gloating he said "Your video feed seems to be down.".

I replied "Really? Why would you think that? Everything is just fine."

All I heard was the clicking of his keyboard then "Ahhuuooo- Click" as he hung up his phone.
I could just imagine the look that must have been on his face to see everything was working perfectly. I guess he never stopped to think about the fact that our main phone number was still working too.

All of the vital systems were hidden in the drop ceiling bolted to the roof and in that back closet.

Before I had wonders if I was being too paranoid. Spending too much money and time going through all these tricks to hide the cables and servers.

After that, I felt so vindicated. What a bitter sweet victory. What a mess to clean up.